johnnychicago
Dabbler
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2016
- Messages
- 37
Hello --
This is not something I'd do for my main FreeNAS, and not for the backup system either (way too paranoid to do so), but for a convenience backup-of-backup in a third location. It's mostly about the ability to zfs send/receive data to a third location and have it available there without having to think much, except for the installation.
So I have a mainboard with 6 SATA's and around 8 or 10 drives lying around, most of them of the 2 or 3 TB variety. I cannot build combine these into a pool big enough to be of use.
I could do so if I were to stripe them. I realize the risks, and I am happy with them. But the inconvenience I see is that I will never be able to change a disk out from the pool. I'd keep an eye on the smart data, but would have to rebuild the pool if I were to decide that I want to retire a potentially failing drive.
Hence the idea of creating a pool out of vdev's that are degraded mirrors. I would stick 5 drives into the box, create 5 degraded mirrors and use it that way. Should I decide that I want to remove a drive, I'll hang another drive on the sixth SATA port, attach it to the corresponding vdev, wait for the resilvering, then remove the original drive and continue running degraded again.
Has anybody tried this? Been happy with it? Are there obvious or non obvious things I should be aware of before I set this up?
This is not something I'd do for my main FreeNAS, and not for the backup system either (way too paranoid to do so), but for a convenience backup-of-backup in a third location. It's mostly about the ability to zfs send/receive data to a third location and have it available there without having to think much, except for the installation.
So I have a mainboard with 6 SATA's and around 8 or 10 drives lying around, most of them of the 2 or 3 TB variety. I cannot build combine these into a pool big enough to be of use.
I could do so if I were to stripe them. I realize the risks, and I am happy with them. But the inconvenience I see is that I will never be able to change a disk out from the pool. I'd keep an eye on the smart data, but would have to rebuild the pool if I were to decide that I want to retire a potentially failing drive.
Hence the idea of creating a pool out of vdev's that are degraded mirrors. I would stick 5 drives into the box, create 5 degraded mirrors and use it that way. Should I decide that I want to remove a drive, I'll hang another drive on the sixth SATA port, attach it to the corresponding vdev, wait for the resilvering, then remove the original drive and continue running degraded again.
Has anybody tried this? Been happy with it? Are there obvious or non obvious things I should be aware of before I set this up?
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